In November of last year, I woke up one morning, looked at my brown bedroom walls and asked myself, "How have you lived here for over a year and not finished painting this house?" I like to paint. I find it very calming, it gives me uninterrupted time to think, and I love the sense of accomplishment I get when I see the finished product, everything looks fresh and new, and I'm that good sort of physical labor tired that makes you feel like you've done an honest day's work. I love it. So much so that when we had painters come in to do the living room, family room, and kitchen before we moved in, I didn't have them do the bedrooms and hallways. I wanted to do them myself.

Now, if you remember, this house had a lot going on paint wise when we moved in. I wrote about it here. Our bedroom and D's office have something similar going on with different walls painted different colors in a more than an accent wall kind of a way. So when I woke up that morning back in November, I took myself down to Home Depot that day and made some paint choices.

I want our bedroom to be dark and cozy. We have dark furniture, and I could go for very light on the walls, but instead, I want an almost gothic feel to the room...in a non-Goth way, so Grant Gray seems perfect to me.

I went for a still dark gray in Elemental Gray for D's office that I think will lend a very professional vibe especially when he's on a video call.

A's bedroom is going to be Spun Wool. It's neutral but rosy and reminds me of the color of her nursery.

I chose Silver Bullet for the hallways but have to admit that I'm not convinced yet. I love when you walk into a model home, and it has one consistent color throughout, but...I like to have very subtle shade changes from room to room (instead of wall to wall), so you don't even realize it's a different color. But our downstairs hallway is very dark. A guest goes from our very light grey and bright living room down this dark hallway to the powder room. I'm actually leaning towards painting it white. I know...groundbreaking.

If you've made it this far, and you are observant, you are probably now wondering, "Ok, so that was November which was over six months ago?" and you are correct. It hasn't happened. In November, I bought paint, and the next week, D had a pulmonary embolism. All the way through January we were visiting doctors to figure out what caused it since he isn't in a risk group as well as going through some challenges getting him onto meds that worked for him. Since then, it's just been a steady stream of work, business trips, holidays, theatre competitions, and everything that comes with senior year. I don't see any time for painting in my future until Memorial Day weekend, but that's my plan. Wish me luck.

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I've spent the last few days thinking about my resolutions for next year. I'm a sucker for resolutions and make them every year the same way that I always get excited in the fall for back to school and for the first sign of changing seasons. I guess I just like new beginnings and the chance for a fresh start. But before I start to sound pious, I hate Monday mornings - every single week.

Part of my process is to review the resolutions I made last year and think about what went well and why and what didn't go well. If I want to make some of the same resolutions, I want to have better results this year after all.

One of my resolutions last year was to travel more. I wanted to stop thinking about going places and actually go. Little did I know how well I was going to achieve this goal. Oh, the irony.

For some background, it's not as though I didn't do any traveling in 2016. We actually took an extended family vacation in France. The joy of that trip led me to wish to continue traveling through 2017. And I did. Just not the way I expected.

I decided to document my travels using Starbucks You Are Here mugs at the beginning of the year. Coffee is a constant in my life, and I thought this would be a fun way to look back after the year was over. Little did I know I would end up with 19 mugs.

Some of them seemed apparent. We still have family in California, we even had our Disneyland passes, so of course, we would end up in with California mugs as we made several trips back throughout the year. That takes care of 7 out of 19, and I only had to go to California once on business - even better.

#8 is a bit of a cheat. We live in Las Vegas, so that's not really traveling now, is it? Well, when you look at 9 - 19, I felt like my time in Vegas was a vacation at times.

I traveled a lot on business this year, at least for me, often multiple cities per trip and often trips back to back with only two or three days in between. And I saw some crazy weather along the way as well. I was in Texas most often (I think 8 times total) and when in Houston found out how terrifying waiting for tornados can be. Tornado weather is just plain scary, and I don't know if I would ever get used to it. I also experienced flooding in Houston but wasn't there for the worst of it. It's a beautiful city, and I would love to have a chance to go back and explore as a tourist soon.

I also really enjoyed my time in Atlanta and Charlotte. I think. That trip was very rushed and multi-city. I guess I need to go back to figure out which restaurants were where.

I wasn't in Chicago very long, and I didn't really enjoy my time there. If you have any recommendations to convince me to give it another chance, I'm open.

Colorado was very cold but very brown when I was there with no snow yet. Luckily, I've been there before in the winter and know how beautiful the mountains are. I need to go back now in the summer.

And that's it for 2017. No foreign travel but enough domestic to keep me really busy and to have a very full mug cabinet. Where did your travels take you this year?

Over the last few weeks, I've been experimenting with some big changes in how I'm planning and how I want to plan in 2018. This year I moved into separate planners, like this MAMBI Happy Planner with Gold Expander Rings, focused on individual projects or areas of my life. I love this from the perspective of keeping my supporting documents, goal setting, milestones and plans together in one place, but this does cause confusion and potential for forgetting things if I don't check every planner on a daily basis. To prevent that from happening, I started using a bullet journal like this one

to transfer my tasks into one spot to stay on top of them, but I much prefer using my Day Designer

to plan out my tasks for the day because I like to time-bound tasks, so at this point, I've basically eliminated the use of a bullet journal except for keeping my habit tracker.

This system has been working well, but I felt limited because I no longer had somewhere consolidated where I could look at all my weekly appointments and workload at a glance. This was really where I was struggling and some days just feeling complete overwhelm from overbooking myself or forgetting commitments.

I had purchased a Van Der Spek and hadn't yet used it, so I decided to pair it with weekly inserts from Printable Pineapple to consolidate my week, making sure I have a level workload. Then on a daily basis, I pull out my daily tasks, transfer them to my Day Designer and keep that with me as I work throughout the day.

Since I gave up on the bullet journal, I did feel the need to add one more item to my planning arsenal. I needed someplace to jot down tasks and thoughts as they pop into my head as well as the habit tracker.

I ordered this simple graph notebook, and I use it as a somewhat modified bullet journal almost in the reverse of my weekly/daily planning process. In the evening, I sit down and transfer notes and tasks into the appropriate project planners.

I'm still working out my system for advance or annual planning, so I'll share that as soon as I get it figured out. What are you planning on using next year?